Gabriel's epiphany analysis

The text is an extract from J. Joyce's "The Dead", the final short story from the collection "Dubliners" and it reports Gabriel Conroy's epiphany which is a sudden revelation of self-consciousness which causes a change in his persona.

Gabriel, who considered himself a master, suddenly sees himself as mastered: he finds himself controlled by his own desire for his wife Gretta that, on the contrary, is thinking about her past lover, Michael Furey, who "died for her sake". This implies he who died felt a passion in his life, a passion still living in Gretta's memory. So Gabriel understands that Michael Furey, even if dead, lives more than him who is physically alive, because he is remembered and the passion which bounded him to Gretta is still alive.

The extract begins with the short phrase "She was fast asleep", which creates a contrast between the two main characters of the extract, Gabriel and his wife Gretta. Indeed the reader could understand she can easily sleep since she has no trouble while Gabriel, who is wide awake, has trouble because he felt as though she loved Michael Furey more than him and that he has been unable to feel a passion like the one who lead Furey to die for Gretta.
Gabriel laments the loss of connection with his wife Gretta which is the result of her revealing the truth about her first love, Michael Furey, a subject that Gabriel was not aware of until now. This make him suspicious on what other may his wife have hidden to him.
Indeed, when Gabriel becomes aware that Gretta loved Michael Furey, he becomes unsure of his relationship with his wife: he is afraid that she doesn’t love him as deeply as she loved Michael, but he is also aware he has never loved someone so much as Michael did ("He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love") and he tries to justify his inability to love blaming his wife.
This inability to feel such a great passion is particular disturbing to Gabriel because he strongly believes that is "better pass boldly into that other word, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and witherdismally with age".

This achievement of self-consciousness causes a change in Gabriel's perspective and signs a moment of character growth which lead to the desire to break with the situation of paralysis in which Gabriel finds himself and the consequent decision to "set on his journey westward", which means going west into the sunset and, in a metaphorical way, towards death.

So Gabriel finds himself dealing with the dead and the past, of which Michael Furey is the personification. The snow (associated with paralysis and death) falling upon everything in this scene perfectly match with Gabriel realisation that one can’t simply let go of the past. But the past will always be carried with a person so that the living and the dead become one. This seems to be confirmed by the snow which covers equally the living and the dead dissolving the edges of the two words which are not separated as Gabriel had believed before understanding a dead, Michael Furey, has more emotional power over Gretta than has Gabriel himself who is living.